A skeptical young man one day conversing with the celebrated Dr. Parr, observed that he would believe nothing which he could not understand. Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any mans I know.

All the other passions condescend at times to accept the inexorable logic of facts; but jealousy looks facts straight in the face, ignores them utterly, and says that she knows a great deal better than they can tell her.

Always say a kind word if you can, if only that it may come in, perhaps, with singular opportuneness, entering some mournful mans darkened room, like a beautiful firefly, whose happy circumvolutions he cannot but watch, forgetting his many troubles.

Always win fools first. They talk much, and what they have once uttered they will stick to; whereas there is always time, up to the last moment, to bring before a wise man arguments that may entirely change his opinion.

Any one who is much talked of must be much maligned. This seems to be a harsh conclusion; but when you consider how much more given men are to depreciate than to appreciate, you will acknowledge that there is some truth in the saying.

Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little, you may often look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvement: we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit, which could have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere.

It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live, than to be loved by them; and this not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.

Many a man has a kind of a kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken glass are his own merits and fortunes; and they fall into harmonious arrangements, and delight him, often most mischievously and to his ultimate detriment; but they are a present pleasure.

Most terrors are but spectral illusions. Only have the courage of the man who could walk up to his spectre seated in the chair before him, and sit down upon it; the horrid thing will not partake the chair with you.

No doubt hard work is a great police agent. If everybody were worked from morning till night, and then carefully locked up, the register of crime might be greatly diminished. But what would become of human nature? Where would be the room for growth in such a system of things? It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and need, a variety of passions, circumstances, and temptations, even through sin and misery, that mens natures are developed.

No man, or woman, was ever cured of love by discovering the falseness of his or her lover. The living together for three long, rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.

Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs, are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm.

The heroic example of other days is in great part the source of the courage of each generation; and men walk up composedly to the most perilous enterprises, beckoned onward by the shades of the brave that were.

The man who could withstand, with his fellow-men in single line, a change of cavalry may lose all command of himself on the occurrence of a fire in to own house, because of some homely reminiscence unknown to the observing bystander.

The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury and wrong pass before their minds,efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.